Enacting is Exacting

STEVE: Well, we’ve only got two weeks left…
TIM: Two weeks? That’s enough time to put together a whole new show!
ALL: (laughter)

(Later, on the car ride home…)

TIM: I wasn’t actually joking.
ME: …yeah, I know.

It’s always a bit of a surreal leap, jumping between Fringe-level theatre and mid-level theatre.

(And, to clarify, by Fringe-level I’m not just including shows on the Fringe circuit, but shows produced by regular members of that community – y’know, the countless shows produced year-round at venues like the Bryant-Lake Bowl, or various pubs and clubs and cabarets around the Twin Cities. I’d say if you’re dealing with things like season announcements and boards of directors and grant applications, what you’re looking at is probably mid-level. (There’s a handful of groups that successfully straddle both worlds – groups like Joking Envelope and Walking Shadow and Four Humors – but I’d say that for the most part they’re pretty segregated.) High-level, we’re talking financial juggernauts like the Guthrie. My experience is primarily with the first two – I’ve acted in both and produced both – and since I’ll be talking about them for a bit, let’s call them "Fringelers" and "Middlers.")

For someone used to the creative chaos of pulling together a Fringeler show, there’s something that feels almost decadent about a six-week rehearsal process. I’ve acted in an hour-long show where I didn’t see a word of the script until a week before opening. I’ve done a one-man show where I wrote the final scene a few hours before opening night. I’ve done a comedy where my very first time stepping onto the stage was the performance itself. This is an environment where it’s a bit weird that I usually have a complete draft six months in advance, and that I typically have scripts under development for 2-8 years.

Thing is, I don’t think this is laziness (or not wholly laziness, anyway). I’d argue that it’s a legitimate process – the goal is not to have a neatly polished show on opening night, but to line up all the elements of the performance and turn its development into an interactive process with the audience. It’s about preserving spontaneity and wildly experimenting from evening to evening. Middlers talk about being ready for opening – Fringelers talk about having a smoothly-executed show by closing night. And this, I think, is one of the key places where the two groups stare at each other in blank incomprehension. To Middlers, the idea of changing your performance every night appears unthinkably irresponsible; to Fringelers, the idea of not making any changes after opening appears unthinkably lazy.

I want to emphasize that I’m not suggesting that one approach is inherently superior to another – they’re both valuable and valid – simply trying to express the creative whiplash I get moving between the two. The great advantage of a process like that for Steampunk Delusions is that, by the time we opened, I had a fairly tightly choreographed performance, beat for beat and moment for moment, that I usually don’t achieve unless I’ve been touring a show for a few months.

The flip side is that it represented the first time in a long time when I opened a show in which exactly zero percent of the performance was audience-tested, and I made most of the attendant mistakes – barreling through laughter I wasn’t expecting, pausing for laughter that never emerged. I’ve done this kind of thing enough that I’ve been able to make adjustments on the fly, but it’s the opposite of the problems I typically have (and am used to dealing with).

---

It’s always a bit strange for me to be around more traditionally-trained actors, who talk about things like feelings and methods in the context of these deeply internalized processes. One of the great reasons I was drawn to mime, in retrospect, is that it offered a tangible course of physical mastery – as opposed to most acting training I encountered, which seemed to revolve around what I was thinking or feeling at any given moment.

I’m embarrassed to admit that I once went through one of those obnoxious phases where I felt I had to spend the time leading up to the performance meditating myself into some state of brooding intensity. It puts me in mind of Chaplin’s assertion that the fact that an actor feels the need to be mentally operated upon in order to do his fucking job is a sign that he needs to seek a new profession.

A great revelation for me was that what was going on inside my head had very little to do with how well I was doing onstage. I could be truly emotional and truly feeling it and truly, totally cut off from my audience – likewise, my mind could be wandering and I could be doing a wholly serviceable job.

In fact, I’ve almost swung around to the opposite approach now, where I feel the need to be doing something silly before walking onstage – talking about comic books or dancing or telling dirty jokes – so that I’m not thinking too much about what I’m about to do until I’m actually doing it. To torture an analogy, when you’re playing a musical instrument, you ideally don’t want to be concentrating really hard on every individual note – sometimes, it’s better to just relax and play. (To torture the analogy further, I often have the sense that Middlers want their shows to be symphonies – Fringelers want to be jazz.)

That said, I find that my internal monologue onstage these days is almost wholly technical – “Hold for laughter, wait ‘til it starts to fade, okay, next punchline – she tried something new, respond to it – try a quizzical expression here, see if it gets a laugh, nope, try something different tomorrow night...” etc.

---

All of the above are probably reasons why I’m more comfortable identifying myself as a performer or an entertainer, rather than an actor. I’m competent when it comes to working crowds or individual moments onstage, but that’s not the same skill set as being able to embody a range of characters, which remains beyond me. The former goes a long way towards making up for the latter, but it’s pretty rare to find someone who can effectively do both.

This was perhaps illustrated most clearly for me when I started holding open auditions for my company, and when I handed my comedy monologues over, well – when I performed them, that’s what they were; at their best, effective collections of setups and punchlines. But when actual actors read them, they could make them seem organic, with, y’know, internal character logic and stuff.

That’s the kind of thing that the Middlers excel at, and that I wish I did, too. It’s also Reason #69,105 that I wish I was still able to produce ensemble work.

Delusions of Steampunk

So I finally got the chance to see English Scrimshaw's To Mars, With Tesla on our opening night -- we may be performing together, but the two shows have been developed largely in isolation from each other. Supremely entertaining, and also got me thinking about the nature of steampunk -- a bit more than working on our own show did, I suspect largely because our process has been detail-oriented -- a classic case of not seeing the forest for the trees (or the protozoa for its component atoms, to coin a glasses-stompingly geeky phrase).

(Actually, it's pretty freaking questionable to what degree either show can be called "steampunk" -- they're both period sci-fi, but neither features steam power in any meaningful way.)

I've never been hostile to the steampunk movement, but it's always left me a bit baffled -- out of all time periods and imaginative landscapes, why, in particular, pick that one to fetishize? And it only now occurs to me that its romance closely parallels that of the American West -- they both showed us frontiers, one physical, one cerebral. The aftermath of the Industrial Revolution represented a bottleneck moment for our species, when the sciences accelerated rapidly enough to make anything seem possible -- Manifest Intellectual Destiny, as it were.

It's been observed that Isaac Newton was a dude who knew the bulk of the knowable science of his day -- and that that's simply no longer possible; our collective knowledge has grown so diverse and specialized that the individual human brain lacks the storage capacity to track it all. (Hence many specialist physicians leaning on collections of reference texts: they need a diverse enough background to recognize patterns and know where to look, but can't reasonably be expected to retain every treatment for every symptom of every disease they'll ever come across.)

The nineteenth century, then, perhaps represents a kind of Goldilocks moment in the Western world: a time when some guy with a microscope could make all kinds of discoveries, simply because *so few people before him had ever tried*. With a few notable exceptions, the days of folks like Tesla and Edison throwing together world-changing inventions in their private studies are a thing of the past, and it's hard not to feel a certain longing for that.

After all, with the days of do-it-yourself science largely behind us (and surely the concept of Iron Man represents a similar longing), the newest frontiers are *expensive* -- and my observation, watching my father, among others, is that the bulk of a scientist's time is spent dealing with money -- trying to obtain it and trying to keep it. (And while grant systems have always been baffling to me, they're particularly baffling here -- where an applicant has to claim what the likely results of an experiment will be before they can obtain the funds necessary to run it, which is about as unscientific a process as I can conceive of.)

This is a recurring fantasy in Crichton's sci-fi, where a brilliant entrepreneur will finance labs to experiment freely, without the pressure of generating marketable product. The longing for a wealthy patron is both natural and unhealthy, and it's one that both artists and scientists share -- nor it is their only commonality.

After all, the career arc of most individual artists and scientists runs roughly parallel -- that is, toiling in obscurity. Shakespeare's become a household name. Academics and theatre practitioners know a few of his contemporaries -- Kit Marlowe, Ben Jonson, Thomas Kyd. How many other playwrights were doing good and worthy work that has simply fallen into obscurity? Dozens? Hundreds?

I suspect that both of our careers revolve around much the same principle: toiling away at that good and worthy work, but ultimately -- keeping the pathways open, both professional and neural, for that one-in-a-million idea that just might change everything.

Oh, and the show's pretty funny, too. Two more weekends.

See, this is exactly why I stopped political blogging.

“All art is quite useless.”

-Oscar Wilde

So there’s been another kerfuffle in the arts scene of late, this time surrounding the fact that the Guthrie’s upcoming season is almost entirely written/directed by white males. There’s been a lot of opinions being aggressively bandied back and forth, but it did light up the idle thought for me: how diverse has my own casting been? And, hey, I generally prefer numbers to emotions in these kinds of discussions, so I thought I’d sit down and, y’know, generate some.

These numbers are drawn by tallying up all of the performers in the ensemble shows I produced from 2003-2011. I have *not* included any of my one-man shows, as they would pretty dramatically skew the results. While I would frequently consult with other members of my creative team, all final casting decisions were mine and mine alone. So here’s the big number:

22% white male

78% minority

…which looks pretty freakin’ diverse, but as is the case with many statistics, is also profoundly misleading. Let’s break that down a bit. First, by gender:

56% female

44% male

…and I’ll append a few quick thoughts here:

-          My plays generally feature more female characters than male characters. However, while I’ve written many short stories with female protagonists, every single play I’ve produced features a male lead. I have a preoccupation with masculine perspective and identity.

-          My intention and my hope is that the female roles I’ve written have been complex, thoughtful, and/or fun for women to play, although that question would, perhaps, be better put to the actresses that have played them. I hope this not because of a special desire to write women a certain way, but because I have this hope about all of my characters, regardless of gender.

-          My plays also tend to feature women in positions of power and authority. I have heard this described as being empowerment by some, exploitation by others. I don’t pretend to know which, and I don’t think they’re mutually exclusive.

-          I have the sense that there are a limited number of female “types” that are socially acceptable for men to write, generally variations on either helpless victims or invincible badasses, and wandering outside those norms can lead to criticism.

-          I find the notion that men are either genetically or socially incapable of writing interesting female characters to be both dubious and offensive.

-          I have written many gags around both hypersexualized women and hypersexualized men, because I (and audiences) seem to find them funny.

-          I identify as a feminist: I believe in the social, legal, and economic equality of women. However, the self-aggrandizing language used by many modern feminists often causes me to cringe in embarrassment.

-          I absolutely believe that the steps made towards equality by women in the last century have been a majorly positive thing, both for us as individuals and us as a culture, nor do I believe that that work is complete. I also think that the redefinition of gender roles has thrown masculine identity into a legitimate crisis that has been both ill-examined and treated unfairly dismissively by many within the feminist movement.

-          I have led a life dominated by powerful and intelligent women: I had a father who traveled frequently, a mother, and three older sisters. I am currently in a serious long-term relationship with a career woman whose intelligence and earning power both exceed mine by an order of magnitude. I find that to this day I still communicate better with women than I do with men, though my closest friendships have generally been male.

-          I identify as heterosexual; I’m a believer in the Kinsey scale, but I seem to be pretty firmly at one end. I fantasize about women in many different contexts, and I don’t feel a great deal of guilt about this.

-          I’m not convinced that this is particularly relevant, but as it seems to inevitably be brought up in these conversations, I’ve been both sexually dominant and sexually submissive, and derived pleasure from both roles.

Onto ethnicity:

63% white

37% minority

…with more thoughts:

-          I don’t believe in “colorblind” casting: ethnicity is an aspect of identity, and identity is an aspect of character, and race, in my opinion, should absolutely be a consideration in the faces chosen to put to words.

-          Along these lines, I think that the white power groups who complained about casting “The fairest of gods” as a black man in the Thor movie were justified. That said, I’m also the dude who cast a black female as the Norse god of thunder.

-          On those occasions when I put out an open call for auditions, the actors who turned up were overwhelmingly white, despite requests for diversity in the call.

-          I have on multiple occasions cast black actors, only to have them drop when they discovered that the pay would be less than their expectations.

-          The above two facts lead me to the suspicion that the smaller proportion of black actors gives them greater opportunity, but my sample size is much, much too small for that to be anything more than anecdotal. I would be genuinely interested in any numbers out there along these lines; nearly all statistics I’ve seen relate to the raw number of actors by ethnicity, rather than to the work/pay that they’re receiving. One data set in particular I’d like to see: what percentage of working black actors locally belong to Equity, as opposed to working white actors?

-          It’s been some years since I was aggressively auditioning, but I have never had the sense that I was either given or turned down a role because of my race.

-          I am biracial, and have written extensively on the subject of race. My shows on this subject have consistently been among my bestselling work, and my audiences have been almost entirely white.

-          I am the only member of my immediate family to be born in this country: my parents and all three of my sisters are immigrants.

-          Being biracial, the ethnicity of my appearance has oscillated wildly over the course of my life. For the bulk of my childhood, I appeared very Asian; after puberty, my features changed enough to make my ethnicity difficult to identify.

-          I attended a number of different schools due to my anger issues, but the bulk of my time was spent in private Catholic schools, where the student body tended to be white.

-          I suspect that the above two facts are why I generally identify myself as Asian-American, as opposed to Caucasian.

-          I resent being told how I, as an Asian-American male, am supposed to feel about my ethnicity. Additionally, I find it rather absurd to be given this lecture by white people.

-          I also find absurdity in a culture that tells me I’m supposed to find pride in my Asian roots, but shame in my white ones. If “yellow pride” is acceptable, then “white pride” must be as well.

-          The politics of most Asian-American groups make me cringe.

-          I also cringe when white people ask me for my opinion “as an Asian-American”, as though I were some sort of spokesperson for everyone sharing my genetic markers.

-          I also cringe when those opinions are dismissed because I’m “not Asian enough.”

-          I appreciate the intention behind politically correct speech, but I also can’t ignore the fact that I usually see it used as a tool to shut down discussion, rather than to open it.

Finally, some thoughts on the Guthrie situation:

-          I don’t fully understand what people mean when they call the Guthrie “a leader in the community.” They deal with larger sums of money, yes, and they give some nice fat paychecks to some excellent local artists, but I don’t know that either of those has a real impact on the decisions that smaller companies make. They also have a larger attendance and are more visible to the non-theatregoing public, but in my experience that audience was not attending my shows anyway.

-          The Guthrie’s focus has historically been on productions of classic European and American theatre, which is dominated by white dudes.

-          Not that this has anything to do with the Guthrie’s intention, but if a white power group were to open a theatre company locally, I’d eagerly see one of their shows. DW Griffith was an asshole, but Birth of a Nation was a way better movie than Intolerance.

-          Many expressed indignation at Joe Dowling’s desire to avoid “tokenism.” This seems to suggest that their worldview doesn’t allow for the possibility that his best applicants were white. I have little difficulty believing this, as I have sat in the director’s chair and cast all-white shows, because my best auditionees were white. This may point to a larger systemic problem, but my first priority is the artistic integrity of my show, not to society as a whole.

-          I am very resistant to the notion of art having any kind of social obligation. My motivations for creating art are almost entirely selfish.

Context, New Text, Black Text, Blue Text

So there's an argument that Ben and I have had once or twice (as opposed to the regular arguments that we have ad nauseam) in which he casually observed that he thought that writing a novel must be the most challenging creative endeavor -- because, as he put it, he'd want to audience-test it in minute chunks. I was immediately resistant to this argument, though it's taken me a while to put my finger on why.

It's a stand-up comic's argument, and I want to qualify that it's one I have a lot of respect for. I'm a huge believer in the necessity of workshopping material in front of an audience. In fact, that was the explicit function of the first Fringe show I ever produced -- Lokasenna was a collection of songs and comedy routines excerpted from a longer script, for the purpose of writing, rewriting, and finding the comic rhythms of the various jokes.

Not that the Fringe was the only place that those scenes ever saw the light of day -- we spent the year leading up to the production working those gags on every stage we could find. In the years that followed, we'd frequently revive them for gig after gig -- in time, man, our shit got *polished*.

I don't regret the time that we spent developing our material -- it produced some lovely bits of writing that I cheerfully stand behind to this day -- but -- well, I'd say it's the benefit of hindsight, but the truth is that any fairly practiced writer could probably have told me what the end result would be: some very funny dialogue embedded in a lumbering, awkwardly paced chimera of a script.

This is why I think the comedian's methods are often ill-applied to long-form work (although the caveat must immediately be made that there are skilled comics, and I'm including Ben on this list, who are proficient at both, putting together long shows by building elaborate structures around their one-liners) -- there's different tools for different goals, and while building a play or a novel may rely on *many* of the same tools, their goals are fundamentally different. Most of my favorite novels would be tedious or incoherent if read in five-minute chunks, while there are plenty of books with clever prose on every page that fall apart as narrative.

(I'd put some of Terry Pratchett's earliest novels in the latter category, though that may put the lie to my argument, as they're very popular. Feh, I say. Give me his later stuff, where the action and characters actually hang together *and make the jokes much funnier*.)

(I sheepishly might also consider placing Penner vs. the Hydra in a similar category, as well, as it seemed to function effectively as a joke machine -- audiences were laughing consistently throughout -- but, I suspect, left them somewhat cold after the fact, possibly symptomatic of placing such a morally troubling character at the play's center.)

This has been, I think, one of the central struggles of my career, learning to write for the short attention span of Festival crowds while maintaining my deeper love for long-form narrative. Tennyson is my favorite poet, not only because of his dazzling versatility, but because of how incredibly *deep* his use of recurring words and phrases and ideas is in his epics. That simply can't be expressed in short bursts. Wagner's genius lies not in his ability to compose themes but in his ability to *layer* them in increasing levels of complexity. That's totally lost when we sample his music like pop songs off a concept album. The Ride of the Valkyries may be loud and exciting, but that's not the point.

(Hi, I'm phil, the world's youngest cranky old man.)

One of the masters of the balancing act, in my opinion, may be Chaplin. Take Modern Times (my favorite movie) -- any one of the individual scenes could be plucked out as a successful comedy short, but assembled they expand on a central idea.

Anyway, that's all a long windup to saying that's why I feel the necessity to hold a full-script reading for Lokasenna (now more marketably titled Norseplay) -- measuring how well the individual pieces work requires, y'know, context and stuff. (Along those lines, this is well-worth reading as well, methinks.)

Taking place this Saturday, and here's the link, if anyone's interested.

This Blog Should Be Retitled "phil Likes Boring Things"

ME: Hey, I've enjoyed talking, but I've got to get going.
HIM: Oh -- are you hosting a panel?
ME: No -- just watching one.
HIM (laughing): You should host a panel. You'd be *hilarious*!

...an observation which was both flattering and dismaying, as I *am* planning on hosting panels for the first time CONvergence this year, none of which are particularly *funny*. (I have sat on panels in the past, including, yes, some comedy ones.)

I mean, I'm a comedy writer -- I typically see (or perform in) several comedy shows a week. Many of the shows at these cons are performed by colleagues, who I can (and do) see year-round. I know people who go to cons and see nothing *but* comedy shows, but, truthfully, I'm far more interested in watching a room full of scientists argue about bioethics.

In that respect, Minicon is very much up my alley. CONvergence is (among many other things) a party con, and much of it is defined by an (at times exhausting) need to entertain. And it strikes me that it's defined, in many respects, by its inclusivity ("Come one, come all"), while Minicon seems in equal measure to be defined by its exclusivity (for serious, if not necessarily somber, fans of science and science fiction).

(I'm being, no doubt, unjustly reductive here -- CONvergence has plenty of thoughtful discussion, and Minicon has plenty of celebratory silliness -- but dealing in subtleties would ruin, simply ruin, the unfair generalization I'm trying to make here.)

(It's also worth noting that I'm dealing with some very uneven data samples -- I was ferrying back and forth to rehearsals for my other show, and consequently missed a good chunk of the con.)

My main goal in spreading out to some other cons this year has been to see if there's an audience I can capitalize on. And while Minicon wins the trophy for my personal enjoyment -- I count the "Year in Science" panel as one of the more stimulating hours in recent memory -- I'm at a bit of a loss as to how I can use it. (I can imagine a day in the future when I *could*, so that data is useful (if expensive), but my career simply isn't in that place now.)

When the day comes that I can afford vacations, I'm looking forward to revisiting this place. But for an entertainer? For someone trying to reach a critical mass of audience, and build a niche within that? CONvergence? CONvergence is prime time.

Reflection and Refraction

So a lot of my energy for the past week has been going to Steampunk Delusions, a double-bill produced by Hardcover Theater and English Scrimshaw Theatrical Novelties. Hardcover is one of those theatres that's been on my radar for a while -- its mission seemed uniquely compatible with MV's -- and Steve Schroer (the Artistic Director) and I once briefly discussed the possibility of working together (many years ago, and nothing ever came of it).

In any case, I was recommended for the lead in the Hardcover half: The Diamond Lens, a kind of poetic Victorian mad-science story that explores some of the questions that would ultimately lead to quantum theory. (The story's online for anyone who's interested, and it's well worth reading.) This is rare for me, but when I read the thing I immediately wanted the role, immediately thought I might be well-suited for it -- its dense, overwrought language is exactly the kind of thing I've been doing onstage for years, and as for the content -- I'm pretty sure I've *written* this story before: is has some more than superficial similarities to Quantum Suicide, and its protagonist, one Douglas Linley, has some more than superficial similarities to Richard (though, I would say, much more so in the original than in the adaptation).

This is also the first time in a long time that I've done detailed text work on a show that isn't -- well, that I didn't *write*. Steve, I think, is an excellent director, with that rare combination of clarity and efficiency; so working with him has been interesting for me, in that it's rare for me to be able to watch another writer's process with such intimacy.

See, the story poses some unique problems in adaptation, largely because it's told from the point of view of an emotionally reserved introvert. As the ponderous language is much of initially attracted me to the story, I would probably have made great effort to preserve it; whereas Steve's approach has been to take Linley's internal world and to *externalize* it, to find ways to make it animated and theatrical.

Both are, I think, valid methods. But I'm struck by the fact that he chose the one more immediately accessible to an audience, and the thought occurs to me, ruefully, that decisions like this are among the reasons that he still has a production company, and I don't.

Conception, Deception, Veracity, and Mendacity

"I don’t know if this is what happened, but it’s what I remember.”
-Federico Fellini, flinging himself from an exploding taxi at 37,000 feet

So I’ve been devoting a lot of thought cycles over the past week to the Mike Daisey controversy. For those who haven’t been following it (i.e. pretty much everyone outside of the arts community), he’s a storyteller who’s been called out for pretty baldly misrepresenting some information in a political/autobiographical show. I’d say that it’s probably best summarized here, though in the interest of fairness it’s worth noting that Daisey himself took issue with its representation here. I’d also suggest that this is a must-read.

So why have I been so preoccupied with it? Particularly as someone who typically has zero interest in celebrity scandals? For one thing, I think it has some bearing on how storytellers are viewed by the general public. For another, because I think I’ve got something to say about it – if there’s any title I can reasonably be said to have earned in the course of my career (er, other than “pompous douchebag”) it’s that of a storyteller. Ultimately, though, I think it’s because it raises some important and worthy questions about the nature of what we do.

(It’s also worth noting that I had a similar, and similarly ugly, exchange in last year’s Fringe. Most of my colleagues responded with eye-rolling bemusement, claiming that it was ridiculous that anyone would care about the misrepresentation of history in a freakin’ Fringe show, and, well, maybe, but fuck, *I* care. In fact, one of the major themes of the show I produced for that Festival was examining how it’s possible to find an objective history in one that’s been warped to so many different agendas.)

(Which, okay, I’m tangenting again here, but I think it’s worth examining; one of the key questions here is *audience complicity*. While I think it’s likely that Mordred was a historical figure and Lancelot a literary one, the point is that, when I hit the stage with a Southern accent, camo pants, a tape recorder, and a wheelchair, people know that they’re not getting a literal representation of fifth-century Britain.)

(This is, sort-of-incidentally, also why I love schlockfests like John Boorman’s Excalibur and loathe movies like the Clive Owen King Arthur in equal measure: because the former’s all about *magical* truth (awesomely uber-cheesy, B-movie magic), while the latter’s every bit as bullshit, but hell-bent on convincing you of its historical veracity.)

(Two, four, six…fourteen! Fourteen parentheses! Ah, ah, ah.)

This is something that I’ve struggled with in my own career. Descendant of Dragons – my own political/autobiographical show about going to China – was originally titled *Descendants* of Dragons, since in its original conception it was supposed to be a collection of family histories. But as I conducted my research, and the various accounts became more entangled and contradictory, the title had to shift, because it stopped being an objective history and became a personal one – it stopped being about *them*, and it became about *me*, and the only way to respond to my loss of detachment with integrity was to embrace it.

(It’s also a quirk of my autobiographical shows that I only very rarely write *dialogue*, because I’m not comfortable putting words in people’s mouths when I’m not 100% certain of what they said. There are times when it becomes necessary, but generally I’m more comfortable *describing* conversations that *enacting* them. This is one of the reasons I so ardently defend my use of notes for autobiographical shows – I may be *performing*, but I’m not doing impressions, I’m not acting, and I want the audience to be crystal-clear about that fact.)

But I’m a liar, too. To pick a moment at random: towards the beginning of Pissing on the Great Wall, I describe myself sitting and listening to music, unaware that my kitchen is on fire. I don’t remember what song I was listening to, but in the show I claim it was Cab Calloway’s “Chinese Rhythm.” I claimed that because I wanted to use the song there. There’s a number of ways I could have approached that – I could have done some cutesy, meta “I don’t remember what was playing, but it might have been this” thing – and it probably would have been fine, but it would have deflated the momentum of the scene. So I lied.

This is comparatively trivial, but I’m mentioning it for two reasons. The first is because I suspect that most autobiographical shows are full of dozens of moments like these, moments where action is compressed or dialogue is moved to create a more logical flow of action and emotion. (Attributed to Mark Twain: “It’s no wonder that truth is stranger than fiction. Fiction has to make sense.”) The second is because I’m a hypocrite: in doing this, I demonstrated that, whatever I may say or choose to believe about myself, on some level I think it’s okay to lie onstage – I’m just quibbling over the scale of that lie.

(That was actually kind of painful to write.)

So, yes, I may be deluding myself, but I believe that Daisey’s broken through to a wholly different level of deception, for three reasons:

1) the sheer scale of it. This isn’t mere arrangement of events, but complete conjuration of emotionally significant moments that he never experienced.

2) That he has consistently maintained falsehoods, *outside of the context of his own show* -- to fact-checkers, in public interviews, et cetera.

3) Because his primary intent was something other than personal narrative. This is where his defenders claim that he was on some level justified – “the ends justify the means” – whereas in my view this is the very thing that makes his actions most damnable – that he appropriated these falsehoods in a show that he intended to weaponize – to suggest that it’s okay to do evil, even small evil, in the service of what they have deemed to be a Great Cause.

I would cautiously identify myself as a fan of Daisey’s – cautiously, because I’ve had fairly limited exposure to his work; I followed his blog for a while, and watched some clips of his shows online (of which his How Theater Failed America is a favorite – I don’t wholly agree with his thesis, but it was thrilling to watch him ridicule so many of the sacred cows in our profession). It’s been strange to watch his response to the scandal, in which he wildly oscillates between being the startlingly thoughtful, articulate writer I’ve come to admire, and writing infuriating shit like this:

"In the last forty-eight hours I have been equated with Stephen Glass, James Frey, and Greg Mortenson. Given the tenor of the condemnation, you would think I had concocted an elaborate, fanciful universe filled with furnaces in which babies are burned to make iPhone components, or that I never went to China, never stood outside the gates of Foxconn, never pretended to be a businessman to get inside of factories, never spoken to any workers.

Especially galling is how many are gleefully eager to dance on my grave expressly so they can return to ignoring everything about the circumstances under which their devices are made. Given the tone, you would think I had fabulated an elaborate hoax, filled with astonishing horrors that no one had ever seen before."

…which is just so damn many levels of missing the point.

(I also, as a theatre practitioner, don’t find his “It’s theatre!” defense terribly convincing. At times, I find it troublingly familiar to the kind of two-step Michael Moore pulls: y’know, how when he’s called an “entertainer” he becomes indignant and claims that he’s an activist and this is social justice and such, and then when he’s called on his deliberate misrepresentation of information, Moore shrugs and claims that he’s “just an entertainer.”)

In their interview, Ira Glass cornered Daisey on the “theatre” line, suggesting that he was kidding himself if he truly believed that the distinctions he was drawing were ones that his audience was cognizant of. (He made a poor choice of words in saying “normal people”; “laymen” might have been less divisive.) And I do think that Glass is absolutely right: Daisey has been been kidding himself. He’s kidding himself when he suggests that it’s not that big a deal; he was kidding himself when he thought that no one would notice; he’s *definitely* kidding himself with the implication that the people who feel hurt and betrayed are somehow out to get him.

But this, I think, is one of the great existential battles that we as storytellers have to face: not the conscious deception of others, but the far more insidious *self*-deception. Studies have suggested that every time we remember events, we subtly rewrite them. I find it unlikely that the factory guards that Daisey witnessed were actually armed; by the same token, I find it equally likely that at this point, he genuinely recalls that they were. The implications of that, for all of us, are profoundly terrifying, if you give it a moment’s thought.

(Nancy Donoval, a local storyteller who tells many stories about her late father, expressed a similar fear to me: that on the one hand, her stories are a way of keeping her father alive; on the other, her actual memories may be being replaced by the stories. How much of my relationship with my own father is real, and how much is a false narrative that I’ve constructed in the course of writing two shows about that relationship?)

(One of the Catholic-school arguments I found compelling when I was – well, going there – is the idea that the earliest Gospels *must* have some semblance of (capital-T) Truth, because at the time they were written, people who had known Him were still alive. I’ve since lived through two W. administrations, and realized that a populace will continually rewrite its own collective Truth *as it’s actually unfolding in front of them*. I don’t think I’m stretching to suggest that politics, like storytelling, revolves around the construction of narrative.)

I believe that relativism is absolutely (tee-hee) the wrong answer to this problem: to claim that everybody lies, so lying is therefore okay. The ends, as far as I’m concerned, emphatically do *not* justify the means. Mr. Daisey’s going to have to wear this albatross around his neck for the rest of his career, justifiably or otherwise. But in my view, the fact that self-deception is such a perpetual peril for those of us in this profession means that we must remain vigilant against it.

It’s my view that the pursuit of truth is the most critically important of all human endeavors. Deception obfuscates that.

Just ask Fellini.